a door opens

in which I suddenly (or not so suddenly) swerve toward birth-work!?

My birthday is tomorrow — I will be thirty-two! This is the sweetest birthday I’ve had in years. A few weekends ago, some of my closest friends who live far away visited and we went roller skating and had dinner at a fancy restaurant I’ve always wanted to try and it felt like everything I wanted my thirtieth birthday to be (except I was 38 weeks pregnant and deeply uncomfortable on my thirtieth birthday, lol.) But the sweetness doesn’t just come from celebration with friends and outside good things, it comes from within too. I feel good. For the first time in years. “Good” isn’t the right word, actually. I feel recollected. I feel integrated? Something like that. My second baby is almost two, I am not currently pregnant or postpartum. My brain is functioning, my body feels normal for once, and my energy and ideas and capacity are slowly trending upward. But, beyond all that, I think my spirit has finally caught up to all the change and challenge of the past five years, my long, long matrescence. I told a friend recently, “For so long I was caught in the deep work of ‘becoming a mom’ — I’m fully there now. I’ve become.” I’ve been slowly waking up to this new feeling, like a dawn I had forgotten to remember was coming.

It’s a funny feeling, because we want more children. I really want more children. So. I know I will return to that underworld, if you will, that I know so well. But this lull between babies is so arrestingly sweet in terms of my sense of self and my experience of my own life. I’m back! I’m alive! Everything is ok! There must have been some massive hormone shift, because it’s a big feeling, unmissable and acute. The past month has been full of big and surprising things in my self and my family — some very good and some very bad. I am not going to write about the very bad things because they are not my story to tell. But when the force of unwanted negative change is met by the force of surprising positive change, the whole shebang seems to ring with extra depth, at least in my limited experience.

It all started when one of my dearest friends invited me to photograph her third birth. My friend is a doula, and she was my doula for my second birth. I was so honored to do this for her and to be there in her birthing space. But, leading up to the birth, I also felt a little bit ambivalent — I didn’t know what to expect, didn’t know if I would be able to take good enough photos, didn’t know how I would feel as a witness. On the morning of the birth, I woke up at six to a bunch of texts and missed calls. My friend had tried to contact me at like 4 am and I’d forgotten to leave my ringer on. I leapt out of bed, tossed (so to speak) my two year old who I co-sleep with to my husband, and drove downtown to the birth center as fast as I could. Lo and behold, the contractions that had been picking up in the early morning were dying down just as I arrived. But, the moment I walked into the room, the same room where I had given birth just about two years ago now, I felt an overwhelming feeling — this is exactly where you are supposed to be.

It was really wild. I don’t know how to make sense even of the clarity of that feeling. It was so intense, so immediate. Just a few hours later when I walked down the street to a cafe to work for a little while while my friend got some rest before her contractions picked up again, I immediately started researching doula training programs. I couldn’t believe how deeply and how clearly I knew that I needed to learn more about birth work. I was almost laughing at myself, “slow down, girl!” But inner-knowing, or intuition, the “voice of god”, or whatever you want to call it, is powerful. It moves at the speed of life. That same inner-knowing reminds me that this has actually been a long time coming. I’ve honestly been doing birth work in my own way since before I ever gave birth. I’ve been reading and recommending huge piles of books about this, I wrote a poetry collection about this, published zines about this, I’ve made resources that other birth workers have asked to use with their clients. This is old news, in many ways. But it still felt like news to me. Life-changing news. I spent the whole day stunned by the way I felt, watching my friend work hard to welcome her daughter. The only births I had attended had been my own, but your experience of your own birth is very patchwork and otherworldly. This was deeply down-to-earth and I felt grounded and aware through all of it. I felt so grateful, so honored, so blessed to be in the room while something so truly amazing was happening. With my eyes wide open, I watched my friend travel through birth’s wilderness and lift her baby to her chest, flood of euphoria. I clumsily but earnestly photographed every moment, tried to catch the tail of the change. Hours felt like minutes, I could have stayed there forever. Pure and real life, as raw and rare as anything. I will truly never forget it, until I die.

So I walked away knowing that something critical had just changed for me, like a door opening. It felt like an invitation, or maybe even an initiation. Intense, scary, arresting. I felt a bit sheepish, even. Is such a feeling to be trusted? Did it really feel that clear? I took a few weeks to sit with all of the feelings, but then a bunch of stars aligned to encourage me to go before I was ready, to jump in now and commit to training. I worried — should I spend the money? Should I spend the time? I talked with trusted people, I considered saying “no” or “not yet”. But, in the end, I decided to go with my gut and just say “yes.” I started a training program yesterday, heart all a-flutter, deep exhale. Even from the first few beats of the first module, I could tell I had made it to the right place.

I don’t know, life is so wild! If you had told me I would be doing this a year ago, I think I truly would have been surprised. Not shocked, but surprised. How are you making it work? I would ask. So does this mean a career change? Aren’t you tired? Where are you scraping together the time and energy for this? Well past self, the answer to all of those questions is one big huge purple “I don’t know.”

A few wise people I consulted made sure to tell me something I knew was true, which is that you don’t need any sort of official training to practice as a doula or birth worker. It’s a very unregulated system, which is a whole can of worms that I have a lot of feelings about for another time. I considered this, thinking through the option of shifting deeper into birth-work on my own, through my usual bootstrappy methods of self-teaching and obsessive independent research. But, the more I thought about this, the more I didn’t want to do that. For once, I want to be taught. I want to be mentored and guided. I want to meet people in real life and learn in an organized system that I do not need to devise. I have always wanted to go to grad school, but I did not want that much debt or time commitment. I found a training program through an organization that made a big impact on my own births that is extremely rigorous, that has a huge and wide reading list, but that is a fraction of the cost of grad school. And that part of it alone, the rigorous coursework that was clearly so thoughtfully crafted by really genuinely passionate people, feels like such an enriching and nurturing space to spend this time learning. I didn’t know how much I needed teachers. I’ve been learning on my own for so long, and I didn’t realize how lonely I felt. The program I am doing will have an in-person component in my city in the fall and I haven’t felt so excited about something vocation-related in so long. I feel like Fleabag in the confession booth, just before the earth-shattering kiss with Hot Priest (ahhhhh) — she says:

I want someone to tell me what to wear in the morning. No, I want someone to tell me what to wear every morning. I want someone to tell me what to eat. What to like. What to hate. What to rage about. What to listen to. What band to like. What to buy tickets for. What to joke about. What not to joke about. I want someone to tell me what to believe in. Who to vote for and who to love and how to…tell them. I just think I want someone to tell me how to live my life, Father, because so far, I think I’ve been getting it wrong. And I know that’s why people want someone like you in their lives, because you just tell them how to do it. You just tell them what to do and what they’ll get out of the end of it, even though I don’t believe your bullshit and I know that scientifically nothing that I do makes any difference in the end, anyway, I’m still scared. Why am I still scared? So just tell me what to do. Just fucking tell me what to do, Father.”

That scene has made a permanent imprint on my brain, because I feel this way so often. Not quite so intensely, and not completely. In fact, I pride myself on a strong sense of self, knowing what I want and need. But sometimes that is too heavy of a burden to bear, making all of the choices all of the time, building a life that works and makes sense. Sometimes I just want to be taught, to be told, to be held. And, in a big way, that’s how this moment in my life feels. Like my intuition dropped me straight onto a new path that is just the right one, with new teachers and comrades and clear tasks and goals. Right here in this lull between my own childbearing years, where there is just enough space for me to follow this thread. It all feels kind of miraculous. I truly have no idea where I am actually heading or what my work will be at the end of this. Will I be a birth doula? Will I write more zines or books? Will I become a childbirth educator? More birth photography? Some strange mix of everything? Something else entirely? I have no idea and I don’t really care to know yet! I’m just following a call that was all too clear, and that came at just the right time to be unmistakable. “A tilting within myself.” Yes, a little annunciation, in me, with all the holy rawness of a story in motion. I hope at the end of this I can be of service, that I will have something truly helpful to offer to people who are walking through challenge and change. And, if nothing else, I am walking with myself through challenge and change, and I’m here to see it through. Little births everywhere, for all of us, all the time.

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Are you a birth-worker? Reach out! I’d love to chat and hear about your experience. I’m trying to gather information and make friends within this new endeavor! And if you’re a Pittsburgh birth-worker, definitely reach out! I really want to connect!

A lot of my writing through the years has been centered on birth and matrescence. Pretty much this whole newsletter has followed that thread! If you want to read more, check out my zines. I published a six zine series during the first year of my second son’s life called A Year Postpartum that I’m really proud of! And, my poetry collection, Broken Waters, chronicles my first pregnancy and birth.

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to open doors and a life’s work!
xoxo,

Amy